Writing a new Constitution strikes many Americans as a transgressive idea. Our Constitution is the oldest in the world, and it has come to seem immutable. The last really substantive change was a 1971 amendment lowering the voting age to 18. Instead of updating a text written more than 200 years ago, Americans have come to rely on the imaginations of nine justices who decide what they think it should say.
Chileans have a more hands-on relationship with their Constitution. Voters will decide on Sunday whether to approve a replacement of the current one, a document that dates only to 1980 and has already been substantially modified several times.
The South American country is a capitalist democracy with a familiar set of ailments. It is prosperous, but the benefits have accrued mostly to a lucky few. Inequalities of wealth and opportunity are entrenched, environmental degradation poses mounting challenges, and many Chileans have lost faith in the polarized and sclerotic political system.
To set their country on a different course, Chileans have concluded that they need different rules. In a referendum two years ago, almost 80 percent of voters cast ballots in favor of replacing the existing Constitution. Polls show the proposed replacement, created by a special constitutional convention, is not nearly as popular. But Chile’s president, Gabriel Boric, has said that even if it is not approved, the country will still need a new Constitution.
Nations can be too quick to rewrite their national charters. Since 1789, the average constitution has lasted for just 17 years, and writing a new one is sometimes a diversion from the hard work of building better institutions and investing in enduring reforms. But sometimes change is necessary, and the very possibility is a vitalizing force in a nation’s political discourse.
The current Chilean Constitution was created under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Although the current text no longer includes some of the most antidemocratic portions of the original, for many Chileans, replacing it is a necessary step in the process of turning Chile into a genuinely democratic society.
Demands for a new Constitution crystallized in the fall of 2019. Protests triggered by a transit fare hike in Santiago, the metropolis that is home to more than a third of the country’s population, quickly expanded into what Chileans call the estallido social — an explosion of popular anger against the government. Crowds took to the streets every day for weeks on end. Schools closed; subway stations burned. Chile appeared to be succumbing to the political instabilities that plague its neighbors, until the government agreed to hold a referendum on a new Constitution. After Chileans voted to draft a new one, celebrants waved signs, including “Goodbye, General” and “Erasing your legacy will be our legacy.”
Erica Gonzalez, 76, was an active supporter of Salvador Allende, the leftist president overthrown by Pinochet in 1973. When Allende died during Pinochet’s coup, so did her interest in politics. Last year, however, she and a friend decided to go to the Santiago hall where delegates were writing the new Constitution and to stand outside with signs declaring their support. Twice a week for months on end, Ms. Gonzalez traveled by bus and subway, 75 minutes each way. She has continued to campaign for the finished document, even after a man in a passing car pepper sprayed her a few weeks ago while she was handing out pamphlets in the Santiago suburb of La Florida. She said she is afraid the right wing will respond to a new Constitution with violence, as they responded to Allende 50 years ago. But she said she is even more convinced of the need for change.
“I’m not going to live to see the changes, but my children and grandchildren will,” she said.
For many Chileans, the symbolic value of replacing the Pinochet Constitution is closely intertwined with the conviction that the current Constitution stands in the way of a necessary expansion of funding for education, universal health care and other social programs.
The growth of Chile’s economy in recent decades has outstripped that of most of its Latin American neighbors. But among the 38 democracies that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Chile spends the smallest share of its gross domestic product on public services.
Santiago has built the most impressive subway system in South America, and by other measures, too, Chileans have experienced broad improvements in their quality of life. But for the many Chileans with a tenuous grip on economic stability and no safety net beneath their feet, the wealth and privilege of the country’s elite are galling. (Protesters circulated a video of the chairman of a Chilean gas company, Matías Pérez Cruz, trying to chase away sunbathers from a patch of public land in the shadow of his private lake house.)
Camila Valenzuela has a steady job managing logistics for a company that makes artificial sweeteners, but when her uncle was diagnosed with leukemia last year, the family had to borrow money to pay for his care. He died in February, leaving 20 million pesos in medical debts, which the family is struggling to repay by holding raffles and bingo games to raise money. Ms. Valenzuela said she plans to vote for the new Constitution “so that no one has to lose family members or loved ones because they can’t afford to go to the hospital.”
Such stories are so common in Chile that it is something of a shock to read the text of the current Constitution. While it was written under a dictatorship that famously embraced free-market economics, it recognizes a pretty long list of government obligations.
In a 2011 analysis, the law professors David Law and Mila Versteeg found that national constitutions come in two basic flavors. Minimalist documents, more common in English-speaking nations with common-law traditions, focus on the limits of state power. Maximalist constitutions, more common in the rest of the world, include long lists of guaranteed rights. In each group, the actual documents are increasingly similar. What are presented as declarations of national identity and aspiration are really statements of universal principles dressed in local clothing.
There are practical reasons for this: Countries copy what works, they compete to attract investment and skilled labor, they face pressure to conform to international norms, and compatible legal systems facilitate trade. Indeed, countries make similar promises even when they don’t really mean it. The North Korean Constitution guarantees freedom of speech.
The tenuous connection between text and reality is, in part, why some centrist politicians and intellectuals in Chile see the constitutional referendum as a distraction from the real work of improving life in the country.
“It doesn’t really matter if you write a long list of rights,” said Patricio Navia, a political scientist who is on the faculty of both New York University and the Universidad Diego Portales in Chile. “Chile is not Sweden. It’s not going to be able to distribute as much money as a wealthier country. And writing a new Constitution is not going to fix that.”
While countries can ignore what is written, they can also choose to take it seriously. Constitutions exert a powerful shaping force on the lives of nations, as rule books for what is permissible and as lodestars for what is desirable.
The New York Times
